Wednesday, October 10, 2018

In December of 1848, H.N. Wheeler brought almost two bushels of wheat to the store at Liverpool, or Hobart, or wherever it was. For the wheat he got store credit, I gather, although the ledger-keeper did not record the dollar amount of the credit, or what it paid for.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

What puzzles me is: why mention that the wheat was from the Twenty-Mile Prairie? Was wheat from the Twenty-Mile Prairie especially good? — especially bad?

The Twenty-Mile Prairie is an area of Portage and Union Townships, Porter County. Porter and Lake Counties (Goodspeed-Blanchard) explains its name:

This was so named because, as an old settler facetiously said, it was "twenty miles from anywhere" — meaning of course, that it was twenty miles (or some multiple of twenty) from the nearest trading post, being twenty miles from Michigan City and Laporte, and forty miles from Chicago.

H.N. Wheeler may have been the Horace Wheeler who appears in Center Township, Porter County, in the 1850 Census and subsequent censuses, and who is now buried in Kimball Cemetery — but I don't know that Horace's middle initial was N.